The Goodbye Girl
by BehrBeMine
Summary: Shattered glass and overturned cars drive her to dredge up questions she'd long since left behind.
1. The Sound of Silence

Title: The Goodbye Girl  
Author: BehrBeMine  
Disclaimer: Very much not mine. Any of it.  
Summary: Shattered glass and overturned cars drive her to dredge up questions she'd long since left behind.  
Pairing: Rory/Dean  
Note: **ggfic100** prompt #02: _Lasts_. **tamingthemuse** prompt #37: _Devotee_.  
Warnings: Darkness, character death  
Rating: R (overall)  
Beta: Lauren - - thanks.  
Author's Note: Fear not, it is not a songfic. I place lyrics at the beginnings of chapters sometimes merely to set the mood. Sometimes musical artists can do this better than I can as I fumble for the right words.  
Another Note: Written before all of the final season was revealed. Forgive inconsistencies in canon; it was not my intent to follow the last season precisely. The world of this story does not rely on season seven's unveiling. Oh, and please don't kill me. :)

**Chapter One: The Sound of Silence**

- -  
_Some things in this world,  
__Man, they don't make sense.  
__And some things you don't need  
__Until they leave you_

_Then the things that you miss,  
__You say:_

_Baby, baby, baby,  
__When all your love is gone,  
__Who will save me  
__From all I'm up against out in this world?_

-- Matchbox 20, 'Bright Lights'

--

"You never shut up, do you?" Rory asked playfully, securing her cell phone more closely to her ear while keeping her free hand steady on the steering wheel of her car.

"I love it when you rhetorical-ise me."

"You love it any time the focus is on you in any way," Rory told her mother through the phone, her voice teasing but her point blunt.

"This is true. But who am I to deny the fabulous person that I am in any way?"

Rory smiled, signaling and then turning into the right lane of the highway. "So, was there a point to this conversation?"

"Is there ever?"

"Ooh, you can hand out the rhetorical as well as receive it."

"I am so proud of myself. Keeping up with the likes of you, Miss College Graduate."

"Oh, speaking of, did you hear about the party Grandma and Grandpa are throwing me-"

"-In honor of the one year anniversary of your college graduation? God, yes. Your grandmother won't stop talking to Larry about it."

"Mom, there will come a day sometime when you stop naming your appliances and call it the answering machine. And, really, you should pick up once in a while when Grandma calls."

Lorelai scoffed. "I remember the days when you agreed with naming everything to make it unique. And besides, you only say these things because it would keep the brunt of her away from you."

"That is exactly..." Rory's voice faltered as she hurriedly pressed on the brakes, slowing the car considerably to keep from crashing into the slow moving trail of vehicles before her.

"Did we have one of those 'my cell phone cut out at an inappropriate moment' things happen, or did you just swallow your tongue mid-sentence?" Lorelai asked from somewhere far away.

"Oh... Traffic is slowing down here. Sorry, I just got distracted, what with the whole trying to keep the pieces of this car intact thing," Rory explained, her attention still detained as the line moved forward ever so slowly. "I think I'm going to have to call you back."

"Okay," Lorelai said easily. "Take care of Betty."

"I'll make sure my car is fine. Bye, Mom."

Rory disconnected the call and tossed her cell phone to the empty seat beside her. She could see an ambulance up ahead, pulled over on the shoulder of the road. As the line before her budged forward, everyone taking their turn to stare, she saw what remained of a car collision. The two vehicles were pretty totalled, one of them flipped over and headed down the slope of decorative grass separating the two different direction spans of the highway.

Honestly, she tried to pull her eyes away, but something kept them seeking, searching for what had sent her brain a-buzz, the fuzzy, dizzying sensation in her head dulling away her awareness of anything but the crash. She slowed further till the car stopped completely, much to the annoyance of other drivers behind her, who sounded their horns in an alarming way. She was staring down at the ground at a body lying on a small padded mat right outside of the ambulance van. Someone was being given CPR, their hair bloodied and clumped in strange places where jagged edges of broken glass had likely sliced through to the skull.

Rory gasped as her breath caught with the morbidity of staring likely death in the eye. She wiped away sudden tears with frenzied fingers, hurrying to right herself in the driver's seat and forge ahead, away from the accident with its angry car horns speeding her along. Car engine roaring, she sped away from the collision that had drawn stares from her like a Christmas tree caught on fire and lit up with the lick of the flames.

--

The next morning, Rory sat with Lorelai at the kitchen table of her old house, which had become the Lorelai&Luke residence, and she had it tattooed on her brain (thanks to Lorelai and her relentlessness), that it was "for real this time". Coffee was guzzled like gasoline in a Hummer as Rory sat, too troubled with her thoughts to reminisce, as always she used to, about living here. And how amazing it was that she didn't anymore. Her apartment in New York drew many parallels, but without Lorelai, Crap Shack Jr. just didn't compare to the original.

Rory nodded along conversationally to Lorelai's description of how Luke chose orange juice over coffee when there was no tea in the house. "It's like, he abandons the Pizza Hut of morning beverages and stumbles on purpose over to the empty lot of Pizza 73. Orange juice! What have I been married to all these months, I mean, really?"

"Heh," Rory said, her coherence somewhere else, her eyes on the extra large coffee mug in her hands.

"Not liking the analogy?" Lorelai guessed, tilting her head towards Rory's lost expression. "I can do a better one..." The space between herself and her audience was not lost on her. "In fact, with how far away your mind is right now, I could probably invent a time machine, go back, erase what I said, and insert the better analogy in before I even started to speak."

She narrowed her eyes at Rory when still there was no response, nor a lift of the head from the intense staring at the mug. "I'm going to use a real eraser, you know. Your dad stole one for me somewhere around ninth grade to prove something. And he really did, from Mr. Callahan's chalkboard. I know now that he is the one to go to if you want useless stolen crap that has no value to you whatsoever. Until, of course, you invent the 'time machine'. Ooh, I'll put it in air quotes like Dr. Evil... Rory?"

"Hmm?" Rory heard her name, and chose that moment to perk right up, instantly paying attention.

"What's got you looking so 'deer, totally not in headlight range'?"

"Oh, it's nothing. I just... passed a pretty bad crash on the highway yesterday." Rory shrugged her shoulders, trying to will away images of the bloody hair, the overturned car. "I can't find a reason why I was so interested in looking, and why, even after I drove on, it's like I can't look away."

"Didn't anyone ever tell you it's not polite to stare?" Lorelai softened her face and reached out a hand to touch Rory's, which were still entwined around the coffee mug that said, _I was with Stupid until he left the coffee here_. They shared a secret comfort smile.

Rory exhaled deeply, then forged ahead. "_You_ stare."

"At _mirrors_."

"A bit too much, though."

Lorelai found a grin that slowly spread across her features. "Oh, but it's fun to play vain!"

"Play?" Rory did her best to imitate the grin. "Don't kid yourself."

Clearing her throat and taking mock offense, Lorelai reached for the newspaper that was neatly folded on the table. "Cue silent treatment: now."

Rory giggled silently and reached for the sections of the paper that Lorelai tossed away. She never said no to a look at what Stars Hollow tagged as "journalism". It did feature a weekly "Kirk's Kreations" column, after all. Tossing the sports section aside, she was confronted with a familiar face, and gasped loudly, startled. "It's Dean!" she declared to the kitchen surrounding her, her eyes not leaving his face, the solemnity portrayed in every black and white line.

"What?" Lorelai asked, looking up and setting down the page of ads.

Rory's voice cracked as she repeated, more resolute this time, "It's Dean..." Her voice became a whine of _I don't want this, I want the opposite_: "It's _Deeeeaaan_..."

As a tear fell from the storm brewing in Rory's eyes, Lorelai tried to see what her daughter was talking about, but Rory's grip was steely on the paper, thus it wouldn't budge. Lorelai pressed her lips together, however, as she could see the title at the head of the page as Rory's eyes pored over it, as if trying to memorize it before she could attempt to forget it.

_Obituaries_.

--

'Head injuries and internal bleeding' kept replaying itself in her mind, like a horror-story slide-show that just repeated the image of morbidity like the loud, consistent beeping of an alarm clock. The late-May spring air sent strands of her hair to tickle her cheeks lightly, the feeling similar to a caress. She met the strands with the palm of her hand, holding them gently to her face. Reveling in the one soft thing that would touch her all day, knowing the stab in her heart would begin its pierce as soon as she rose to a panic.

The soft breeze was a short one, and soon enough all of Rory's strands fell back into casual waves along the top of her shoulders. There were so many things she had been realizing ever since viewing the particular section of the newspaper that hardly ever had reason to be included. She realized now that her hair was cut similar to the length of her first year at Yale, again. She heard his voice in her reminiscent mind:

"Did I ever tell you I like your hair?"

She squinted at the sunshine that peeked through the lush leaves overhead as she sat at the same spot where she had found such sorrow the day that Dean got married. She let herself use that as an excuse to look at nothing but the frayed edge of her jean skirt. She picked at soft grass near her body, leaning slightly on the old tree beside her. Turned out, it was nothing like leaning on a friend. Whatever sweet nothings the leaves gently whispered, they weren't understood by her, not this day.

There were so many things she didn't understand that day. Like why this was affecting her so much when she hadn't spoken to or heard from Dean since their final break-up in the immaculate driveway of her grandparents' home. When he said out loud what she would come to realize as fresh days and new relationships developed in the wake of the hollowness he left within her. That it was time to say goodbye to their time together. That he _didn't belong _in her life anymore, and maybe never did.

And then there was Logan, who was the bombshell to carry the ache of the memories of Dean out into space. She'd rarely even thought about that time in her life since it had been overcome. She was introduced to the world of rich men's hair products, and glowing short blonde strands to replace the floppy wisps of brown that she held in her grip as she was _together_ with a man for the first time. Logan was everything that Dean had meant to say he would never be.

'So, _now_ you care?' she thought bitterly to herself. 'Now that he's gone, "survived by" his parents, his sister, and no one else.' No wife, for Rory had helped take that away. She'd thought of dropping Dean a postcard, here and there, and saying those things reserved for people you don't understand how to communicate with anymore. Lots of "things here are good" and "hope you're doing well", and not much of anything else. She'd made herself ignore the depth of the connection when it was alive, and now it had been severed by a roughly driven dark green jeep. That's what one of the cars had looked like. Somehow she sensed that Dean's was the overturned faded red truck that met its doom in the ditch separating two areas of highway.

Somehow, she'd never dealt with the reality that there would come a day when there would be nowhere to deliver those unwritten post cards. No chances to ask, when she was lonely, "Do you ever think about me?"

Her mind had been blasted by a violent volcanic eruption, which blew the significance of recent things away, replacing them with memories of being a teenager, a girl lost in love with Dean. It was as if the volcano had paved a tunnel right to the part of her brain that saw things most clearly, like viewing her troubles through a magnifying glass. She was remembering the way that it had been, really been. The love that had been truer than she'd experienced since.

She used to have a boy who became a man in her presence, and grew more attached to her than to his wife. She knew a man who had the most tender way of caressing her naked upper arm while they snuggled together under her sheets that were no longer infused with virginity, but enlivened with passion that couldn't be spoken with words.

She was left, now, with the memory of Dean driving away that last time. Left with the pieces of a past that was now broken and would be tainted with the emptiness in the reality that now one of them was dead. The memories were left alone to her, for her to do what she would with them.

She could ask him no more questions. She would never look at that face again. Instead, his deliciously dark hair wouldn't be full of life, but stuck with gooey dark red blood, like she saw that day on the highway. When she stopped without knowing the reason for her morbid fascination that would so quickly come to be explained, and abhorred.

Where she had left him before, sparkling in her many-sequined blue dress and diamond tiara, watching him leave, his thoughts full of things that she never had the chance to correct. Ideas of their lives being too different; their destinies too far spread.

All that separated them now was the big piece of land between her spot on the large hill and the church building, which was in plain view. She didn't attend his wedding; she couldn't bring herself to attend his funeral, either. Not the traditional way, at least. She knew that the service was going on inside of the building every second that she sat there, on the hill that was so conveniently removed from the immediate situation. She felt like rising to a cloud and perching there, squinting her eyes not only at the sun, but in an effort to see what was going on so far down below. Perhaps amid the masses of cloud, she could forget and surrender her misery, and float around like in a dream.

She bit her lip at the thought of that denial, that childish way of wishing for something other than what was apparent and permanently affixed at the forefront of her brain. She was the devotee to all of the misery she had caused and the goodness she had left behind her to forge ahead into a world that turned into... this.

The church doors opened, and a small hoard of black, drearily-clothed souls migrated from the funeral back to their cars, some license plates from Chicago, others from closer locales. She pressed her lips into a line and felt alone, just like that day when he'd run to a vehicle of his own with a new bride he barely knew. The day when she'd sat in this exact spot, hiding from feelings that came to fester and feel like an ulcer in the pit of her stomach.

She couldn't hide from her feelings today. But she could hide her presence from everyone else, while she searched for a rewind button on her life, and his.

_(For God sakes, turn around...)_

--

She thought, as the church was long since empty, and the sun was beginning to set, of seeing his grave, one day. She wondered if, as she stood before his gravestone, she'd resort to the 'Patch Addams' poetry reading or the 'Forrest Gump' confusion speech. And talk about heaven or hell, as if anyone really knew what either one was. All she knew of hell was the torment that was funneling in her mind, making her steps heavy and labored, as if it hurt to move. How deeply could the agony set in her bones? How many pain relievers would it take to make her body numb and her mind absent from this place, this space in time?

She didn't feel like counting games. She didn't visit his grave, to see the dates of birth and death, a life sealed, zipped, and filed away. She didn't want to set foot on the freshly dug grave so that it could give death to the fifteen year-old in her own body, and snatch away all she had to hold on to of a past lover who deserved a proper goodbye. She would not say it. She would not contribute to that file. She would not be an active part of his death, knowing the way he had wanted her as more a part of his life.

She left the somber grassy hill, intending never to visit it again.

--

"You're playing 'house' again," Lorelai noted, as if it was an understood term as Rory entered the kitchen, looking for an easy dinner.

"Playing house? I'm _in_ a house," she corrected.

"You know what, I'd have to card you right now if you entered my liquor store, babe," Lorelai continued by way of explanation.

"I usually do get carded."

"Now they're going to think your I.D. is fake."

"Why?" Rory shook her hair about a bit, and nervously pulled upon the dark sleeves of her most depressing yet comfortable shirt.

"That jean skirt is so 2000 for you. Maybe even earlier. I find it hard to believe that was still in your closet."

Rory sighed, dropping into a chair at the table, her voice defeated. "What do you mean?"

Lorelai looked to different parts of the ceiling as she struggled to word her point correctly. "It's like you're regressing. Nineteen again, and stumbling out of your room to tell me that a boy's here to borrow a book."

"Mom..."

"It's like you're trying to live in a time when you had him as a surefire part of your life."

"Are you always this annoyingly insightful?" Rory asked, wanting to rub her eyes but unable to due to the thin coat of mascara on her lashes.

"Freud jumped into my body last night. We switched bodies in our dreams."

"I hate Freud..." Rory muttered, letting her head fall to rest, forehead first, on the kitchen table.

"All teenagers would say that."

Rory's voice was garbled a bit by her position and her words were difficult to understand. "'M not a teenager anymore."

"A day ago I didn't think so, either," Lorelai said pointedly. "There's no use living the past, hun. You're just going to wind up letting your future pass you by. And you'll be trapped behind glass, like a dying fish in a zoo somewhere."

"Why would it die...?"

"Well, a fish isn't that interesting an animal. I kind of wanted to end that analogy as soon as I started it."

Rory's slight chuckle came out like a sigh, before she dropped her arms onto the table and rested her head on their softness. She closed her eyes, and saw the empty black space her first boyfriend had been surrendered to.

"You can scream, if you want," Lorelai offered, when enough time had passed that they almost both fell asleep right then and there. "You can have the whole house." She stood from her chair, her movements uneasy. "But I can't hear it. I just can't," she said, gathering Paul Anka from where he sat comprehending his strange little world on the floor and taking him with her out to the yard.

Plugging her ears at the far end of the front yard, Lorelai waited for a loud sound, a single, long release of terror at the biggest loss yet in Rory's life. She waited for the sound of an eternal flat line to penetrate the stuffed holes in her ears, a generation long curse word bleeped out on public television. She waited for a single scream to pierce the air for so long that it seemed foreign when the silence remained afterward as she found the bravery to stop plugging her ears. She waited, her limbs tense as the silence was all that met her, and now engulfed her daughter completely.

- -  
to be continued...


	2. The Ghost Of You

Title: The Goodbye Girl  
Author: BehrBeMine  
Disclaimer: Very much not mine. Any of it.  
Summary: Shattered glass and overturned cars drive her to dredge up questions she'd long since left behind.  
Pairing: Rory/Dean  
Note: **ggfic100** prompt #55: _Spirit_. **tamingthemuse** prompt #38: _Abacus_.  
Warnings: Darkness, character death. Also, I feel the need to label this story AU, though much of the canon past remains the same.  
Rating: R  
Beta: Hasn't been properly beta'd this time. I've been sick, and things didn't fall into place all to plan. All mistakes are my own -- hope things turn out okay.  
Note: All lyrics belong to Matchbox Twenty. Spoilers for 'Sphere' by Michael Crichton ahead (it's an older work).  
Author's Note: Seriously, this story is like the darkest 'Gilmore' project I've ever tried to claim. When I see these scenarios in my head, I want to see them brought to life by the 'Gilmore Girls' characters. I guess I'm hoping other people can see beauty in the same thing. Be warned, this is dark.

**Chapter 2: The Ghost Of You**

- -  
_I think I've already lost you  
__I think you're already gone  
__I think I'm finally scared now  
__You think I'm weak  
__I think you're wrong_

_I bet you're hard to get over  
__I bet the room just won't shine  
__I bet my hands I can stay here  
__I bet you need more than you mind_

_There's a little bit of something me  
__In everything in you_

-- Matchbox 20, 'If You're Gone'

--

Saturday night arrived, along with obligations and the big Gilmore grandparents' bash. Lorelai stood in Rory's old bedroom doorway, sighing and leaning her weight heavily on the door frame. "Three coats of eyeliner -- really? Has my daughter gone Goth?"

"I'm in mourning," Rory muttered, lowering her eyelashes that were gloriously pumped with body and curl.

"And you choose to mourn in devil make-up?"

Rory waved a moody, frustrated hand in a swinging motion towards her mother, as if willing her away with a front of air. As long as she looked the part of a teenager, she might as well keep her acting up to snuff.

"You're hiding," Lorelai said in the same creepy know-it-all voice she kept finding at Rory's door. "Behind 'suicidal clown' face, no less."

"So let me hide," Rory told her, and lowered her chin onto her folded arms as she swung her legs impatiently from her spot on her stomach atop the bed.

"I don't get you lately." Lorelai's eyes held the horror of seeing the past week scoot by, ever so slowly.

Rory pursed her lips. "I know." She beat her heavy, socked feet together behind her back, folding them gently, rocking them back and forth in the air.

Lorelai stood up straight now, uncomfortable with the stale air. "You know you can't go to the party tonight looking like that. My mother will have a heart attack. As entertaining as the look on her face would be, I'm not looking forward to the party ending at the hospital tonight. I think your face alone can show how much drama we don't need at this point."

"Okay."

"So you'll fix your face?"

Rory sighed and pushed her way off of the bed, headed for her closet. "A bit more Cinderella and a little less Manson?" she guessed.

"Think 'older'. Until you get to Barbara Walters, and then backtrack a few decades."

"I know how old I am."

"And Paul Anka knows it isn't really a monster that makes his refillable water dish give that burp of bubbles. But sometimes he still needs a reminder."

"Poor Paul Anka," Rory said, her voice and mind distracted for a moment over thoughts of a dog that ran from water dishes. "I don't think about it often, but he really goes through a lot, for a dog."

Lorelai looked meaningfully at her daughter, watching her rifle through the good dresses that still hung in this closet she used to live out of. "Yeah. He really does," she said.

Fingering the fabric of a dress with blue sequins that each housed a different memory, Rory was silent with her thoughts for a few minutes. She shook her head to rid her vision of the piece of bang that had slipped into her eyes, escaped from the lazy half ponytail combined in the back of her hair. Her voice faltered like it hit a bad note as she turned suddenly and said, "Mom?"

But the doorway was empty, Lorelai already gone to get ready for the party herself.

Rory turned back to the dress, letting the material fall through her fingers like silk. She smiled sadly at it, pained by its silence, and then turned from it and left the room.

--

Rory washed her make-up off in the shower, watching the mascara streaks as they left her chin to dabble down along her stomach, decorating the flatness of it like black tiny tears. She went through the routine of shampooing her hair twice, then letting conditioner set while she soaped up her body, wiping away absolutely any speck of dirt. It was like she was trying to coax the repercussions of his death from her cells and wash it out of existence with the soap that ran past it.

When finally, after forty minutes, she stepped out of the shower stall and wrapped a butterfly towel around her body, hot steam engulfed the entire room. Rory knew it probably had fogged up the mirror above the sink, but she looked toward it just in case -- and got a chill when she saw the message written in the steam: _Tuesday_.

The damp towel around her body felt like it was soaked in cold sweat as she brought a hand to her forehead and wiped it dry. "**Mom**?" she shouted boldly, feeling paralyzed in the legs.

She heard footsteps on the other side of the door. "Yeah, hun?"

"Did you write something in the mirror while I was taking a shower?"

"Uh, if I did, you know that it would have the same fabulous signature I sign all of my notes with."

"Seriously, this wasn't from you?" Rory's voice had a quake in it; she shivered and hugged the towel to her body.

Lorelai opened the door and stepped into the bathroom, touching Rory's shoulder to make sure she was okay. Rory snapped her face to her mother, her expression resembling that of a baby animal upon seeing a pal shot right in front of its eyes. Lorelai looked at the mirror and frowned.

--

"Oh my God, I'm being haunted!" Rory shouted as she emerged from her room in an elegant red summer dress, toweling her damp hair.

"What? You're crazy," Lorelai offered, "and you so need to calm down."

"It's a message. From Dean. He wrote me that!" Rory's eyes were wild with fright at the idea.

Lorelai tried not to roll her own eyes too obviously. "Well, thank God you're being rational about all this."

"Mom! Seriously. When do I freak out like this? I'm telling you, that was in his handwriting."

"I'm so wishing I carried a tape recorder in my pocket right now..."

"He died on Tuesday," Rory stated flatly.

Lorelai blinked toward the ceiling, trying to keep this conversation on the ground. "Remember your first Michael Crichton, when you were eleven?"

"'Sphere'? Of course. Why are you changing the subject?"

"Oh, believe me, I'm not. Remember how you were afraid of water for a whole week while you read that book? How you were sure a giant squid was going to materialize the second you sat in the bath tub?"

Rory was shaking her head. "I'm not seeing giant squid in my dreams, Mom. I'm seeing something that's really there."

"What's really there? Someone writing 'Tuesday' on the bathroom mirror a few days ago, and forgetting to wipe it off before the next steam-up?"

"Nobody wrote 'Tuesday'. Why would somebody write 'Tuesday'? Except if they died on one."

"What if," Lorelai supposed, "you're rushing the gun _just_ a little bit? I mean, come on. If you were going to reach back from the great beyond, wouldn't you at least write something interesting, like, 'The next winning lottery number will be...'"

"You're not even trying to believe me. You're mocking me."

"Of course I am. Honey, you're letting your head go nuts. Squirrels are going to start fighting over you. You need to calm down." Lorelai gripped Rory's shoulders gently, meeting her daughter's eyes. "And think about what you're saying."

Sighing, Rory nodded, then shook her head as if trying to rid it of its insanity. "Okay. You're right. I'll rationalize better. His death has just gotten to me, and I feel like it's been all wrapped around me."

"Well, time to unwrap. Find Rational Rory. I know she's somewhere inside of you. I miss her. It's no fun being the sane one all the time." Lorelai chucked Rory lightly on the cheek, and gave her a dazzling smile.

Rory tentatively smiled back. "I can see why that would be hard on you." She bit her bottom lip and looked toward the bathroom. "I'd better get my hair dried. If I go outside with it wet, I might catch a... cool breeze."

"Oh. Yeah. That would be bad." Lorelai hurried away to finish getting ready herself as Rory wandered to the scene of the crime. When she turned on the bathroom light, she found that luckily the steam had flown from the room out the open door, and she could see nothing but her reflection in the mirror.

--

"Will you watch Paul Anka for a minute?" Lorelai asked at the bedroom door as Rory finished putting in her second hoop earring. "I need to use the curling iron, and he always has a bad reaction to it."

"You have the weirdest dog," Rory deadpanned.

"Shh. He can hear you." Lorelai ushered Paul Anka into the room and shut the door behind her as she left. "Ten minutes and we're gone!" she sang through the wood.

Hair straightened, earrings dangling, dress clinging, eyes all shadowed, Rory took a seat on her neatly made bed, trying not to act as though Paul Anka's silence made her wary. Lorelai always insisted he could pick up on bad vibes in anyone. Not one to spend much time with Paul Anka, Rory eyed him carefully, finding it odd how he just sat with such good posture right beside the door.

"Paul Anka, you can come on in further," Rory said to him. When he didn't make a move in response, she brought her fingers to her forehead, feeling a bit of a headache coming on.

When she closed her eyes, the world rushed away, and she was in the front seat of a car, as a dark green jeep sped the wrong way down the highway. She could hear a soft voice whispering in her ears, saying, _You hide inside till your voice collides with the death of sound_. And the jeep collided with the car she sat in, sending large splinters of glass from the windshield flying in toward her face --

-- Rory started, opening her eyes and breathing shallowly, a sense of dread gripping her even in wakefulness. When she looked down to her knees that sat along the left side of her bed, she saw that Paul Anka was nearer to her now, his nose in the air, as he sniffed at it, sensing... something.

As she blinked, the world fell into blackness around her, in giant puzzle pieces. And she could hear the roar of traffic from beside her as she stared up into the blinding sun, her head smashed down on pavement, a splitting headache at the forefront of her face. _Someone turned off the waterfalls because they were leaking_, was what she heard, and a roar, as if from thunder, rumbled the sky --

-- Paul Anka was barking as Rory came to, steadying her body as it still sat upon her childhood bed, atop the bedspread with the fluffy pillows. What he was barking at wasn't clear, as Rory could see nothing in the room around her. But she could _sense_ that she and Paul Anka's voice were not the only things in that room.

--

"Hello! Welcome," said the maid at the impressive Gilmore entrance. Her blonde hair was held back in such a severe bun that her eyes looked almost cat-like in their almond shape. She took Lorelai and Rory's coats, and led them into the party room, where Rory's graduation celebration was in full swing, as was the tasteful band on stage at the front of the room.

"Lorelai, Rory," Emily welcomed, giving her granddaughter a quick hug. "You two are so late. Really, I thought that soon I would have to make the speech, in place of the guest of honor."

"Sorry, Grandma," Rory said to her, smoothing down her dress that sparkled the color of punch. "The dog went a little crazy, and we had to make sure he was okay."

"The dog?" Emily asked. "Oh, yes. That shaggy old thing with the name of that singer."

"Rory has convinced him she's being haunted," Lorelai said, so helpfully, giving her family a patronizing smile.

"Ha!" Emily laughed softly to herself. "You're all going insane."

"Yeah, we really are." With that, Lorelai headed out to mingle, leaving Rory to deal with Emily's penetrating gaze.

"What's all this about?" Emily asked conspiratorially.

"A friend of mine died on the highway this past week," Rory said, working at keeping her voice level and calm, and more than anything, mature. "It's... been hard dealing with it."

"Oh, dear. Well. Best to think about good things at a time like this. It's your party, Rory. Enjoy it. We're so proud."

"Indeed we are," said Richard, walking up to his two favorite women, a cocktail in his hand. "To think, a granddaughter of mine, graduating at the top of her class from Yale, a year ago, yet. Very satisfying."

"Thanks, Grandpa." Rory tried her best to smile. She let her grandparents engage her in talk of her job at the New York Times, her new apartment that Emily was dying to see, and her "dating life".

"Oh. Well, not dating anyone right now," Rory said uncomfortably, practically squirming under her grandmother's scrutiny. "Not since Logan."

"Well. There will be others, dear, there's no worry about that," Emily said, with a secure pat on the back and a smile she kept as pleased as possible at all times in the midst of a crowd. "Someone will be waiting there when you're ready. You know who I saw the other day was Bruce and Kendall's son, Jeffrey..."

Rory zoned out on the words, knowing it was another potential set-up from this woman who never rested on her participation with society. She felt a sort of throbbing beginning at her temples, blurring her sight until it swirled together as though it were water spiraling down a drain.

_You forget how horrible pain is until you're in it,_ came the whisper in her head, and suddenly she was surrounded by darkness, but this time she wasn't alone. Dean stood a few feet from her, his image short-circuiting as though he were being broadcast from a television screen. She covered her mouth, horrified that he was standing in front of her, and yet incredibly relieved to see him all the same.

Her voice came from more than just her lips, reminiscent of a dream, as she asked him, "How did it feel?" Her mind raced back to the crash into the windshield, the glass shards, Paul Anka's high pitched bark.

She tried not to scream, out of disbelief and gratitude, when his lips began moving along with the words, his image more steady now, with no short-circuiting, as if he was really there. "It's like when you're falling, and you know you can't stop; so you just stop trying," he told her, the story more in his blue-green eyes that stared with such honesty into hers. She drank him in, with large gulps of air, steadying the flurry of her heartbeat as her eyes filled with tears.

"How are you here?" she asked him, and she reached out to touch his hand --

"--though God knows when he'll graduate, with that social life of his," Emily continued, as Rory refocused her eyes on her grandparents standing before her, her grandfather nodding at whatever was still flowing from her grandmother's mouth. And she wondered if they had noticed her fade in and out, or if she'd never truly left this state of consciousness at all. Was she imagining things? Was she in a dream? Would she ever wake up from this nightmare?

--

Rory, sent off to mingle herself, was quite flustered as she tried to smooth talk her way through the large crowd that had gathered in this house in celebration of her. Truly, she would have been awed by the idea, like she had been at her sixteenth birthday party, when first people had come together as if she were important enough to focus on. But there was so much nagging at her every thought, so much confusion and pain bubbling up inside of her that she took every friendly face for granted, as she waited for the next time he would take her and show her something else that no sane person could see.

She wanted to grab him next time; feel if he was solid, and real. She wanted to try to tear him from wherever he was being held, and bring him back into the light of the world he'd left not long ago. Her mind struggled to find reason, her intelligence groping the questions about essence and ghosts and other such intangible things. But her heart longed to be yanked into that world that scared her again -- that world where there was Dean, and he was all alone without her.

So much rationalization told her that this manifestation didn't make sense, that he wouldn't come to her, of all people. Surely there had to be someone else he was closer to in life. Someone he had seen in the last half a decade? She couldn't have been this important. She couldn't deserve all his attention when he was between here and gone.

"Hi, Rory," said Paris as she approached, the long stem of a champagne glass in her hand. She downed half the liquid in one gulp, looking intently at her old college roommate from behind pink tinted eyeshadow. "You're looking pale. How are things?"

In no way did Rory intend to share her recent lack of sanity with someone with whom her relationship was so ambiguous. She conjured up a smile. "Time to hit the tanning beds, I guess," she said as lightly as possible.

"Rory, you're not serious," Paris let herself assume. "You lived with the upcoming MD in me for how many years? Have you forgotten about the dangers of UVB radiation?"

Sighing, Rory was quick to add, "No, no. Haven't forgotten about all those fun discussions. It was just something to say."

"Tanning beds equal skin cancer, Rory," Paris said pointedly, sipping at her champagne, her eyes fixed on Rory's face. "I should almost charge people for all this free medical advice I hand out so selflessly," she said thoughtfully to herself. "Doyle's always saying I give too much of myself to everyone else -- himself not included, of course. He's always got to whine. I'm always doing something wrong.

"Do you agree or are you just being quiet?" she asked when Rory merely stood there, taking things in.

Paris' facial features began to melt as if they were lit candle wax, and the scene before Rory slumped down and out of her vision until she was met with the blackness again. The darkness of a summer night without any stars in the sky, and no crickets chirping to signify that there was life nearby.

Suddenly, Dean's old house was conjured up, the one he lived in for the short time he was married. Dean followed his wife out of the front door, his shirt as rumpled and slept in as his un-brushed hair. "Lindsay, I'm sorry. I couldn't hide the way I felt any longer. Neither of us could."

"I see things perfectly," Lindsay spat, spinning around to face Dean halfway down their driveway. She pushed soft strands of blonde hair away from her cheeks that were just waiting for the tears that would spill. "You always wanted her. It was never about me. About us."

"Lindsay, that's not -- "

"Go to hell!" she told him, venom in her voice and burning like fire from her eyes. "It's not a long journey. It's where I am."

Rory's bedroom furniture rose up to cover the landscape before her, and suddenly she was in Dean's arms, his fingers teasing their way along her bra strap. She could feel his whiskers as he kissed her, waking up her skin, making her feel alive and wanted. She smiled and fingered the unshaven bits on his lower face.

Dean held her gaze in his eyes, and instantly understood. "Lindsay wanted me to shave them off," he told her, his voice soft, and the touch of his wandering hand softer.

"Then don't," Rory whispered, and took his lips in hers once again. She closed her eyes and pushed herself up against the exposed skin of his chest, where there weren't as many whiskers --

-- "worst conversation we've possibly ever had," Paris was saying, seeming upset. "First, you bail on Logan just because he's not an everyday presence in your life. Now, it's like you're doing the same thing to me. You're spacey, you're not all there when I talk to you. It makes me want to knock on your skull until I find some brain activity. Rory. Space Cadet Gilmore, is there life on your planet?"

As the world rushed back to Rory, cramming itself into her headache, she hurried to grasp onto the conversation she'd disappeared from. "Paris, Paris, calm down. I'm just... not myself lately. Do you remember the guy who took me to my first Chilton formal?"

"Of course. He called Tristan an idiot, and they both wanted you. Big surprise." No, Paris wasn't bitter. Or drunk. Or anything.

"He died last week," Rory squeaked out, reaching for her own glass of champagne from the dish of a server who walked past her. She took a swig, and attempted to get a handle on the brain waves that were moshing in her skull. "So if I seem a little distracted... I am."

"Were you two seeing each other again?" Paris guessed, not knowing a delicate way of continuing a conversation. "Is that what the whole dropping Logan thing was about?"

"What? No. Logan left almost a year ago. I haven't seen Dean since... I was first at Yale."

"Sorry." Paris tiptoed around her words awkwardly. "That's got to be... well, I wouldn't know. I haven't known anyone who died since my Aunt Silva when I was four. Even then, I didn't know her well. She was a lot like my mother, who I guess no one like me will ever know."

"Yeah, well." Rory sipped more champagne. "I knew him, very well at one point. We... were close."

"You know, if you ever need to talk... I could recommend half a dozen decent therapists within the New York area..."

Rory tried to make her smile genuine. Good old Paris. "Thanks. But, I think I'll be okay. We should catch up more often, you and me. I... barely know what you and Doyle are up to these days."

"Yes. We'll do that. Call me. You have all my numbers: home, cell, beeper."

"Yes." Rory nodded, and pointed to her empty glass before stepping away. "I'm going to go take this back to the kitchen. Save the servers a trip." She nearly stumbled over her own feet as she headed away from the crowd and into the empty parts of the big house.

--

Rory stood in her mother's old bedroom that had been remodeled for her. She stared at the NSync poster she'd never wanted but had never taken down, then wandered further into the room to eye the perfectly made bed, the walls that had surely been repainted not long ago. This room that was so well maintained, and saw so little company, it saddened her. Or maybe she was already sad enough, and it just washed over her body again in a wave like from an ocean full of giant squid.

She could feel her head begin to pound again, as though booming speakers were blaring hardcore rock from behind the walls of the room. The color black spilled in from the corners of her senses, overtaking everything she saw, spinning and spinning as though she was encased in a tornado which had an eventual destination she had no control over.

"...all of my teachers, fellow graduates. We find ourselves together, on this day, having completed a journey that fewer people are able to reach the end of the longer it is required." Rory could see herself, in the Yale graduation robe, up atop the giant stage constructed on the day she completed her education. As she heard her own voice, which didn't sound so small anymore as it carried more confidence than she'd ever dreamed, she looked around the scene for what she was really supposed to be viewing. This couldn't be about her -- she'd been here before.

All of a sudden, she narrowed her vision and was able to zoom in on the figure of a boy who stepped out from behind a tree beyond the seated audience, leaning against it with a satisfied smile. It was Dean, his hair as long as she remembered it, cascading in a healthy wave down to the tips of his earlobes. The smile that touched his lips but not his eyes was affixed to the face that had only grown more handsome with time.

_You were here?_ she could hear herself thinking, wondering, needing to know. If only she had an Abacus with which she could chart all the times they'd had together that she had forgotten, or never known about.

Dean turned his attention from her body on stage to her gaze that existed beyond the portrayed image of her, and she soaked in his dark jeans and nice shirt. "I was," he told her. "Of course I had to come. I stayed in the shadows, so I wouldn't bother you."

"Oh, Dean," she cried, throwing her arms out and attempting to wrap them around his neck. She fell through him, as though his body took up no literal space at all, landing on the soft green grass behind him. She craned her neck to look back, and he stood before her, his eyes soft and aching for something more, the way that hers were as they scanned him in question. It was almost a frenzied determination she zeroed in on as she stood again and reached out a solemn hand to touch his shoulder.

The image of him shorted out momentarily, as if from that old TV screen once again, and she could feel no substance against the skin of her palm. She was seeing him, but it was like he wasn't really there at all.

"Dean?..." she asked uncertainly.

He looked down, eyelashes falling over his cheeks in solemn acceptance. "You know I'm not here anymore," he told her gently. Reminded her, as if anything else about this made sense. "I hated life without you." Rory lifted her head that had lowered, for he was talking again. "Turns out this life thing hates me right back."

"But I touched you before," she insisted. "I _felt_ you."

Dean shook his head. "It was only a memory."

Rory's voice was clouding with the forecast of oncoming tears. "Give me another one. I want to remember more." She looked into his eyes that were the ocean, in all its vast misunderstood ways and its dangerous currents that could pull one under until they didn't breathe anymore.

In a blink, she was beside him, in her old bed once more, its sheets rumpled beneath the two of them as they laid together in their underwear.

"What's so wrong with role-playing?" he was asking her. "I think it could be sexy, to be someone you've never even come close to... To... make someone wonder when you're going to become yourself again."

"I need to get a grown-up bed," she said distractedly out loud, ignoring this conversation on purpose.

"I like the one you've got," he whispered impishly into her ear, tickling her lobe with his breathy exhale. "It keeps us close together."

"Seriously it does, because there's only room for one person."

"Rory. I like your bed. I like... everything about you."

Despite herself, she smiled as a blush covered her cheeks. And she thought back on what he'd been so interested in moments earlier. "Role-playing, huh?" she said to him. "I can't just be someone else. Otherwise why would Halloween be such a fun idea?"

When he drooped his bottom lip the way he did, her heart curled in on itself, sending a dizzying spell up to her brain to turn her limbs fuzzy and warm. Her toes began to fall asleep, and she reached deep within her for a "role" she'd never played.

She rolled her eyes and unfolded her arms, giving in. She crept up Dean's body with an air of trouble, and mischief in her eyes. She imagined herself as someone like Louise, free and open with a teenager's nature to rebel. "I've been so bad," she purred, straddling Dean and resting on her knees. Despite her earlier protests, she fell for the look in his eyes that hungered for her. An erotic chill rushed through her, ending in a shiver. She clamped her thighs more snugly around his chest, and felt herself come alive, as her panties started to become wet.

"Bad. You?" he teased gently, giving a turned on grunt and bucking his hips gently below her.

She hunched down, rubbing herself against his cotton boxers through her Valentine pink underwear. Her breath was hot on his neck as she nipped it to bring those moans from his voice box and whispered, "Just let me tell you."

His hands ran down the length of her back to grip her closer at the waist. "Why don't you show me instead?" he dared her, and the breath of them both came out as shaky as distracted handwriting hurriedly scribbled on a love note.

She didn't know who she was except an empowered version of Rory as he took her passionately in her teenage bedroom, their bodies on the verge of twenty years, their loins now urgent to be rubbed and licked and loved by the other in this most perfect time to be together. To the outside world, they had the worst timing ever, having begun the affair with adultery, but something in Rory's body was telling her that it _needed_ to be near him, and she couldn't say no to such a force that she couldn't outright control. The _need_ turned her into the other woman, and kept her heart held hostage in the hours between every time he came to brush it again.

Afterward, bathed in her lover's sweat, Rory pulled Dean's arms around her from behind, allowing his body to spoon behind hers and hold her close as a secret. "I do love you," she promised, kissing the arm that held onto her so tightly.

Dean swallowed, as if hearing it for the first time and said in a husky voice, "I believe you."

His skin on hers that tasted of salt was the salve to her personal wounds, and at that moment, she couldn't imagine not having --

"--I remember, I remember..." she was saying, tears falling down her face as she stood in front of that poster in her grandparents' house, her body swaying gently from side to side in an effort to bring comfort that just wouldn't be coveted. The restricting dress that hugged her curves wasn't nearly as soft to the touch as his fingers that used to be there, to tickle, to tease.

Releasing the sobs held within her, she stood in absolute misery, and longed for him like air conditioning in the baking heat of summer...

"Why do you write me postcards now?" he asked her, crawling into the blackness with startling strength. "Now, after I'm gone?"

She couldn't tell him that somehow, it was easier to open up when she didn't expect an answer. Even though she was getting them, in this unconscious state.

"Never got to tell you..." She looked around, trying to find a way to keep the darkness up around her, to cover her eyes, so that she wouldn't open them, and leave him here, to dwell alone until her next blackout.

Rory looked up at him, and narrowed her eyes. Before he could react, she had pounced upon him, gripping his body in her vice-like fingers, searching for skin and not air matter. His form kept short-circuiting before her eyes that looked so closely into his face, as her grip kept tightening, willing him into existence.

"Rory, I want..." He inhaled and exhaled harshly, squinting his eyes as if he were holding up a building that had fallen on one side. "I..."

She pressed forward, placing her lips roughly on his, and suddenly she was met with the soft, pliable skin that he used to inhabit. She could feel his lips beneath hers as she opened her mouth slightly and re-trapped his mouth beneath hers. Noise bubbled up from within her, coming out like a sob, as she cupped his face with her hands, and felt a tear that wasn't her own.

"Stop. molesting. me," he whispered, attempting sarcasm and failing, from beneath her, and she could feel his breath land gently on her face. She opened her eyes that had been closed in delight.

"Make me. Make me stop," she answered, visibly shaken and being torn apart. "Hit rewind."

Gasping, he kissed her then, claimed her with his tongue and his lips that tugged at her, way down to her toes that were beginning to awaken from their slumber.

_Something in me..._

_Everything in..._

_Something in me..._

_In you._

"Can I, can I really have you?" she asked when finally he pulled away to give them both air to breathe and warm their lungs from the lack of oxygen that was turning them blue.

"I can't stay," he said suddenly. "Rory, I can't -- "

And he was ripped away by the darkness surrounding, as if it had claws to wrap around him and pierce his skin until it tore away along with them. Until he was gone. And the poster on the wall of her mother's old room confronted Rory once again, along with the stillness of being alone.

"Wait!" she cried, to any part of the mysterious darkness that may be listening. "Wait!" (wait_wait_wait_wait_...)

- -  
to be continued...


	3. Cry, Baby

Title: The Goodbye Girl  
Author: BehrBeMine  
Disclaimer: Very much not mine. Any of it.  
Summary: Shattered glass and overturned cars drive her to dredge up questions she'd long since left behind.  
Pairing: Rory/Dean  
Rating: R  
Note: **ggfic100** Prompt #58: _Hold_.  
Another Note: All lyrics belong to Matchbox Twenty and Avril Lavigne.  
Author's Note: So, we have reached the end of this short saga. I hope that you enjoy it; that's all I can ask for.

**Chapter 3: Cry, Baby**

- -  
_If I need some other love,  
Give me more than I can stand  
And when my smile gets old and faded,  
Wait around I'll smile again_

_Shouldn't be so complicated  
Just hold me and then  
Just hold me again_

_Can you help me, I'm bent  
I'm so scared that I'll never  
Get put back together  
You're breaking me in  
And this is how we will end  
With you and me... bent_

-- Matchbox 20, 'Bent'

--

Many things were planted already at the head and the foot of his grave; blooming decorations that wafted sweet honey to the smell of the breeze. Rory ignored many things, unable to look, unable to see. She used Babette's hand-sized shovel to dig out a small pile of soil where there was a gap in planted flowers that choked his gravesite in their very abundance.

In the small hole she'd dug, she stuck a white rose, and then covered its lower stem with the freshly dug dirt, which inched up under her nails as she ground her whole hands into the dark, heavy soil, rich with nutrients that would do nothing to save him. He, who was so far below the ground and couldn't know that these affections had been planted to keep him company. All they did was make each planter feel an eighth the better, for knowing they'd left a part of themselves of their choosing as decoration above the land that was packed down on his casket, sealing it away from the world he had left, leaving nothing but his body behind.

Her rose thus planted, her sorrows given an image with petals as soft as his lips (had been), Rory rose from her knees, and after dusting the dirt off of her blue jeans, she left the gravesite, and its haunting stone slab, behind.

--

"Avril Lavigne, in my house? Say it isn't so!"

"But that would be a lie," Rory told her mother plainly, loving and hating the teenage angst-driven lyrics as they rasped from her throat to converge with the stereo-boomed pieces of a well known rocker's voice in the air. _Isn't anyone trying to find me?_ she mouthed from her place atop her back on her too-small bed.

The music was gone with a swift punch of the "stop" button from Lorelai's finger. Rory heard the sound and her brows flinched, though her eyes didn't dare close. But she didn't move her head to meet her mother's stern expression; her cornflower blues continued to circulate around the dotted plaster of her ceiling.

"You're staring so hard, you'd think there was a picture of him up there," came Lorelai's voice from so far away.

"I can see him..."

"When can we have fun with the lunacy jokes again, daughter of mine? When can they stop applying to you, and therefore make you laugh? Do you remember laughter? You used to know it well. You used to shake hands with it, even when not drunk."

"I don't know. Any of it."

"Since when are you okay with not knowing anything? Where are your dictionaries, your encyclopedias, your weapons of immaculate intelligence?" Lorelai stepped close enough to the bed so that she could lean over her daughter and obstruct her view of the ceiling and his invisible image that danced among the spots of plaster. "Where has my daughter gone?"

"I don't..."

Lorelai nodded, and stepped away. Her voice was uncharacteristically low and cold as she said what needed saying: "You can't tell me, because you don't know. You don't want to know a damn thing but him anymore."

Though Rory's throat choked on misery grasping and failing to be sobs at what was happening to all of the living relationships in her life, her mother was well out of the room when she turned on the tortured tunes again, singing along to a girl whose lyrics before she'd always despised, and laughed at, in that way that was foreign to her now. What was laughter, what was happiness, when not recognized anymore? Nothing but memories that were taken along with him.

--

She had become accustomed to the blackouts, so much so that it was almost a comfort now, as she was confronted by one again. The stereo was drowned out by the sound of harsh waves as concussion-like black invaded her, from peripheral version in, swarming to the inner-most center of her pupils.

And there was Dean. He was quiet, squatting in the corner, with his hands trapping his nose and lower face, seeming to be in deep contemplation. She wanted to snatch him again and drag him into her world, like she had for those short seconds, but the futility of such actions seemed to wash over her as he looked her way and shook his head, anticipating everything.

"Why do you come to me?"

"Because you're right here."

"No," she corrected, "why do you come to _me_? Why not to Lindsay, or your parents, your little sister?"

"Lindsay," he scoffed as means of an answer, jerking his eyes away and letting his bangs sway into his face, like those from a head-banging rockstar. "I see you, and so I come to you. Rory... you're all that's there."

She didn't want to say the words that came from her mouth, but maybe it was her mother's face flashing before her eyes that drove her to speak. "Dean, I'm living in 'The Ring' here. Seriously, can you stop?"

He leveled her with his eyes, so easily, and she realized that she, too, was only seeing one person anymore. That he was _all that was there_, as well. "No, Rory. Right now, I can't."

She swallowed. There was something -- a lump of cancer, a storm of tears -- in her throat. "Then help me understand."

"You won't."

"Let me try!" She knew her mind gone mushy was nothing for quoting academia or garnering any explanation of the great expanse that spread between their two worlds, but it wasn't in her to give up, even now. Now that she'd become wrapped up in some warped version of 'The Twilight Zone', and since when, she wondered, was that still on the air?

"There's no way," he told her, and she fought not to believe him. Not to take all of his words to be the absolute truth.

He was up from his corner now, circling where she laid as she stared up at the void where stars, a ceiling, or sunlight should be. When he spoke again, his voice was as calm as always it remained in _this place_. "You know you still name your appliances, Rory. And then tell Lorelai it's ridiculous."

"You spy on me?" Her voice didn't even pretend to accuse; what she spoke were just words.

"...Who are you trying to be?" he asked her, as was his way now, never answering anything.

She breathed through deep, troubled thoughts. There was a deep silence, and then troubled words: "I don't know... I don't. I have no idea."

She propped her head up on her arm, watching his pacing, wishing his legs would slow and he would come to her. She wanted to believe she had the strength to yank him back again, this time for longer, but he would have none of it, it seemed. She resorted to poetics, at last. "There are those who are prettier than me..." she mentioned, trying again to understand.

"But I don't see them."

"Those with silkier voices. Their windows don't even break when they 'sing'."

"I don't hear them."

She used tired hands to rub her eyelids as she wished to rub along his inner thighs. "Those who wouldn't have hurt you this way."

"But I don't want them," he told her, his eyes full of plenty of want, all aimed straight from his core to hers.

"You should. You should have."

"But I never could. I never did."

The lump in her throat bubbled up past her lips, garnered tears on her lashes. "I'm sorry!"

"Rory... I'm not."

She was so lost in his eyes that she didn't recognize which one of their voices it was who whispered, "Stop looking so closely, and maybe you'll see." He came closer to her, both of them damning those words lost between them. She reached out to touch his cheek as he dropped to his knees with such force beside her; her hand brushed through him, and his lashes trembled as if from wind he couldn't feel. Her hand tangled in the mass of nothing as it went through his skin, through his skull, and she felt none of it, only a tingling in her long fingers that pried and screamed to feel him again, the way that she could have years ago, days ago, and didn't. Wasted time was a cruel thing as she was confronted with its repercussions, in blackouts, time and time again.

--

Life was pushing her along, the way that it did to those who would rather linger among the shadows and the dead. Lane was there the day Rory threw clothes into her small short-stay suitcase in a disorganized manner, which did not go unnoticed. Nothing could, nothing did, anymore.

"Rory." Lane's eyes were on her for ten seconds instead of the baby that kept alternating between cooing sweet sounds and spitting up sour milk in Rory's best friend's arms. "Where's the checklist, the first version and the final draft that once in a while you'd laminate? How do you know you're going to remember all your stuff if you don't write and rewrite it down?"

Rory gave Lane a look, spared a glance at the baby, but for once saw none of its beauty. None of its half-Lane-ness that she'd adored since the day it sprang out of its mother. She saw little other than what _Dean's_ mother must have seen when called to the police station to identify the body. She would be glad to be away from Stars Hollow, and it was the first time she could remember thinking that since she used to want to get away from Dean. Now she just wanted to get away from everything else. Everything around here that was a constant reminder that she'd lost him too soon, and had whispered unheard declarations to him far too late.

She couldn't love her friends like she used to; she couldn't look her mother in the eye. She couldn't let them look back and see what was there, that it was nothing. That she was much like a seashell, gutted and smoothed, its insides concave and utterly empty.

"Why are you leaving, Rory? As your best friend, I'm telling you, I deserve to know. Where are you going?"

Rory's eyes flitted to Lane and her beautiful baby again. "I'm going home, Lane. It's time I stopped hanging around here and moping so close to his grave."

"Okay, um, don't kill me for saying this? But Dean: not so much a part of your life for the past how many years?"

"I know, and wasn't that my mistake? Doesn't that have to be the reason why I'm being tortured this way?" Rory busied her hands and her eyes with dumping particles of clothing, some unwashed, some she'd never wear, into her small suitcase that she'd brought to Stars Hollow six days ago. On the day that would be remembered by pitifully less people than was deserved. "It's time I got back to New York. Got back to work. Wrote about other things that aren't so close to me."

"Lorelai was right..." Lane said, shaking her head. "It really is like we don't know you anymore. We don't even recognize you, Rory. _Come back to us_, be the reason I made you a godparent again."

"Lane." Finally, Rory stopped, and tried to genuinely look at the face she'd been excited to tell of her first kiss, the face she'd broken the news to after her first break-up. The face that was there before Dean, and was still there after he'd left. "I have to find it, again."

"Find what?"

"...Me. Who I was."

"You're in there somewhere, Rory. You believe that still, right? You'll get over this. You know that."

"Did I put a pink sweater in here? Because I borrowed Mom's pink sweater to sleep in a few nights ago, and if I pack it, I'm going to hear her hollering from a state away."

Lane sighed, saddened by this experience. Needing to perk up for the baby's sake, thinking it wouldn't do a thing for Rory, she touched her best friend's shoulder and said goodbye, for the time being. "Get home safe, Rory."

Rory continued packing to purposefully shut out the fact that the emptiness she felt was no worse now that Lane had left than it was when she entered the room. Her silence fed the void as she searched in vain for a sweater that, like her mind, just wasn't there.

--

"You'd better become more normalized when you get back to New York," Lorelai admonished. "Or I'll have to bring Michel to your new place and together we'll exorcise the demon that's eating your brain. I'll chant the foreign words; he'll put the sticks to the voodoo doll."

Rory tilted her head at her mother, knowing she would normally fill this space with words of humor and sarcasm, something to comfort the way her humanity was oozing away from her body. "Am I forgetting anything?"

"I'll say," said Lorelai, holding her arms open for a big squishable hug.

Rory let go long before the intended eternity had passed, and soon enough she truly was alone, in her car; back on the freeway, she dared to close her eyes at the exact spot where she'd witnessed her undoing. Where she'd seen Dean's hair bloodied and matted on his head full of death and nothing else. All of her usual safe driving eccentricities were shoved aside in favor of her need not to see that place, and look for any purple blood soaked through the highway pavement. Silly though it was, it was all she could do not to keep her eyes closed for the rest of the drive. Car horns could still startle, she found, even when in this state of mind, and soon enough she was past the forbidden scene of horrors, and was on her way to her small apartment in very large New York.

Her place was the same as she'd left it, when again she arrived. The keys complained when turned in the rusty old locks, and her apartment door still creaked as it was opened. She walked in, threw most of her mail away, deposited her suitcase inside her bedroom, and fell, exhausted, into her bed. She inhaled the sheets, and instead of smelling Bounty fresh, they reeked of old dirt and what lies beneath.

"I can't do this," she said to the walls, who may or may not have been listening.

--

"Sherry, hi," said Rory in a fabulous mock-happy tone. Her cell phone now had use again. "It's Rory Gilmore. I'm back. Oh, it was fine, it was good," she lied as her boss asked the usual after-vacation questions. "Listen, I'm ready to get back to work, like, now. As soon as possible, really. Do you have anything that needs attention? I am all about giving attention to something else."

Sherry came up with a story, stating that Rory was in luck, as Damian had declined it in favor of taking a short vacation of his own just recently. "It's not a serious piece," Sherry divulged, "but if you're wanting to get back into the swing of things in such short order, it should do."

"Great," Rory remarked in that same tone she thought she'd like to adopt forever, jotting down the details on a notepad kept on the fridge at all times. "So you'll let me know of the flight details before the end of the day? Awesome, and their full names are? Uh-huh... Yes..."

When she hung up, there was a sufficient amount of details displayed on her notepad sheet with the cute kitty on the top and the "From the paws of Rory" displayed neatly underneath it. Personalized stationery. It was a Lorelai idea that made its way into Crapshack, Jr.

Okay. So she would leave tomorrow after she'd just left her old home to come to the new home she'd left six days ago only to find Dean dead. Yes, it seemed the only plan was to keep moving, and stop surrendering to the darkness that claimed whenever it chose to mame. So much of her heart was fighting to continue singeing Dean's image into itself like a tattoo, but her brain was starting to come into consciousness again, beginning to salve the wounds until they could scar over, and she could move on without being pointed at like the thing with two heads by her own eyes reflecting back from every mirror.

--

Tossing and turning, she worked hard at getting rested that night. Every time she closed her eyes, his voice was ghosting along her subconscious, his eyes bearing into her soul. And the darkness was ever his companion.

Long after she'd originally planned, Rory fell into sleep, her face gnashed into the pillow, her jaw set in a grim line, as if anticipating what was to come.

"You're getting further and further away..." Dean said to her, the bright spot amid the void and whatnot that surrounded him.

Her lips moved as she slept, able to comprehend her dream self to an extent. "Since when you do find me here? I need to... dream in peace."

"You want me to leave?"

"Dean, you have to. You have to stop this, go away... walk into the light, or whatever. Stop being Seth Green in 'Idle Hands' about the whole thing."

"Rory, you're the light. It's why I can't stop... and it's why I'm always looking at you."

Steeling her nerves, she forced out what followed: "You know that's not what I meant. Can you follow me everywhere or does it stop when I enter Utah tomorrow?"

"You're going to Utah, right. 'To interview boys who have dropped all pretense of religion, forsaking their beliefs to help wage war on other countries.'" The quote of Sherry's phone call earlier was delivered with what seemed a great deal of sarcasm.

"They're in the army, yes. You can hear my phone calls? Dean, that's just creepy now." She couldn't feel a sense of tangible self in this dream sequence; it was the first time he had dared to reach her here. Always before he waited until she was awake, conscious, and better prepared to be ripped from one world into the space between it and another.

"I have to keep an eye on you. It's important, Rory."

If she could roll her eyes, she would have, as anger was starting to seethe into her. If she could feel her arms, she would cross them under her breasts, and somehow she would make her eyes glare at that soul of a boy she loved, loved, loved past death. She didn't know how to keep loving him and forsaking her sanity and everyone else in her life. Exhausted by the way she'd been avoiding everything, her thoughts now went to avoiding him, thinking perhaps those other things would come back.

"Trust me, it's not that important, and I'm fine." She ignored the way that her dream voice wavered, and was glad now not to feel her own arms, for they would betray her and crash into him again, pulling him to her in vain while his shape wouldn't move. She wasn't alone without him; she was alone within his death span, eyes blind to all else because he was dragging her down. They were alone together.

Suddenly, her heart began beating faster in her sleeping body, and the lips that were mouthing words and beginnings of words that ended before sound could find them went dry as leather left out too long in the sun. She felt her limbs baking under heat, as if feeling a touch of hell itself, and in her dream, she screamed, her voice being swallowed up almost before it left her too dry throat. It wasn't that he scared her, but this place he kept bringing her to, this place he could possibly keep her in, was beginning to terrify her. She was beginning to dissect things again, to weigh options on more sides than one. To _see_ beyond the everlasting light that lit his form from behind and made his dead skin golden.

_You're the light_, he was insisting to her, the only light he could see, and suddenly she wanted to banish those words from her comprehension. What if they meant that he would follow her until her light was extinguished from the weight of bearing him with every second? What if, just by being with her and causing her to be there as well, he was dragging her out of existence to be with him in this dark place? Her thoughts ran amuck, and her limbs about the bed went wild as a caged tiger's, trying to claw their way out of this state of unconsciousness, and pull her back from the dark coma.

"Rory, why are you afraid?" Dean was asking, wanting to know. "What you should be afraid of is out there."

"In Utah?" Again she felt the screams emanating from her mouth. "Utah, with its religious soldiers who will no doubt drop to their knees and pray before choosing to pick up their gun?" She struggled to find breath that was quickly leaving her in some sort of panic attack. "Are you jealous of them, is that it? Do you not want me to find other men again, ever? You want me to just stay here with you, as if this hasn't been the most psychotic vacation of my life? Dean, Dean."

Despite her screams and the way she clawed at her sheets, she was sobbing now, not wanting to leave when he couldn't come with her. Not wanting him to be gone... the way that he was.

Dean's face was contorted with pain and disgust at what he was causing and caught in, and then was lit up with pure love, and he searched for her eyes until they chose to meet his. "Don't go to Utah," he told her, seemed to beg of her. "Don't go."

"Now more than ever, Dean, I have to. Go. Go away. Leave me alone, let me go, let me go." She was wailing and crying, a child of thirteen, afraid of the world she was in and wanting to turn the light on. "Let me go, let me go..." She was crying those stupid girlish tears she'd long since abandoned, shooing away the very presence that held most strongly onto her bones and the blood that ran among them.

"Don't go..." he was saying as he faded away, ripped out through that ever-incompetent reception from the television screen atop some devil's desk. She thought such ridiculous thoughts as she focused her eyes so intently on his lips that kept begging her, until his image flickered out and away, and she fell to true unconsciousness, which wasn't light _or_ dark, as in it she comprehended nothing at all.

--

The insistent beeping of an alarm clock dug through her soupy brain and managed to find her ears beneath it and finally, after several hours of cold-water-shock-coaxing with its deafening beeps, it was able to do its job. Rory's eyes opened, her ears in taking the sharp sounds that were emanating from that small box on her nightstand. Jarred as she was by it so suddenly, she couldn't believe it when she saw the time.

"No. No, no, no! How could I? How could... I'm going to be late!"

She'd never slept this late without the aid of her whole three hangovers, never in her life before. Springing out of bed, the mattress coils squeaked as did her bones as she tested the strength of her muscles in dressing faster than was thought to be Gilmorely possible. If she missed this flight, this chance to get on with her life, she felt that surely she might die of the tediousness of those blackout visits that drained her of all that was Rory. All that she so obviously needed to get back.

There wasn't even time for coffee, barely time for a messy half-ponytail, and not all of the buttons on her shirt were properly placed, but in spite of it all, she was at the door in her cow-spotted sweat pants and carry-on bag within eight minutes. "Okay, you look like crap! It must be your daughter's first day at Chilton," she was saying to herself as hurriedly she rushed around, figuring she could clean herself up at some point between the flight and the taxi to the interview. Did they have taxis in Utah? Lorelai had said she thought they had electricity now, and had smiled that smile of hers for Rory's grandmother who never "understood a back-handed comment that came out of that mouth".

Rory liked thinking of these things, liked that she could recall them finally, but she was out of time, and out of breath, and she practically leapt for the door handle of her apartment. She almost had the handle turned when her body collapsed seemingly of its own volition, leaving her unconscious on her apartment floor, suitcase in hand, hair all a blur, with no head wound to speak of to physically hold her eyes closed. But closed they were, and gone to the present world was she.

-

The darkness wasn't her only companion, but this time it brought not only Dean, but colorful images broadcast in the space between himself and her blinking eyes. There were many murmurs of sound, to accompany light-speed views of her face as it changed from age 15 through to 23, from chubby schoolgirl cheeks to hollow ones more befitting a woman of her current age, all seen from the viewpoint of a Dean who had looked at her, alive, and admired such things himself.

She could hear their banter bubbling past their lips, and before long she could see him in the images, too, as they washed over her. She saw his left hand trembling just slightly as he leaned in and kissed her in the middle of a sentence (and the middle of a store). "I got kissed!" she could hear, in strangled teenage language, as the particular image faded away. "And I shoplifted!"

She tried to laugh, but more so than that, she wanted to cry.

Seeing herself in a car, that wonderful car that he'd built her and she'd never gotten to drive, she watched his lips move as they neared her face, but his words were muted.

But then she could see them both on the last day of sophomore year at Chilton -- she could see his green truck, and his back turned to her. And she could hear their words spoken then, could feel the heat emanating off of him from all of his anger, and the heat from her pounding heart that had melted at the sight of him leaving her, the way that she was always leaving him.

"Dean!" she'd cried.

"What?"

"Stop."

"Why?"

Sigh. "Because I love you, you idiot!"

Colors swirled together, stars shot across the daytime sky, as they kissed and were together, for those moments, that time.

"What am I doing here, Rory?" she could hear coming from a Dean of uncertain times, when she was outside of her grandparents' place in her blue-sequined dress and tiara, as confused as he was of what he was asking. What he was expecting. What the two of them were to each other.

"You're picking me up," she'd told him, as if questions didn't matter because she didn't want to examine them. She'd tried to make her drunken eyes glow bright enough to infect his again with the gaiety they'd been stumbling around in, together.

She could hear his words before they even left his mouth, as he shook his head solemnly. "I don't belong here..." he'd said for both of their benefits. "Not anymore."

And she'd let him go. He'd left, then, and she'd let him go...

_You forget how horrible pain is until you're in it_, came Dean's voice, and then Dean was before her, staring into her eyes. Aiding her in taking the lashings of all else there was to hear. He touched her cheek as more words came washing over her senses, and she felt it there without the aid of the physical sensation. _Of course I had to come to your graduation. I stayed in the shadows, so I wouldn't bother you._

Why was his voice everywhere, everywhere? Why were his eyes so intent on claiming her own -- why did she not want to look away for a short second and find her bearings? Her bearings... where had they all gone?

He reached out to stroke her cheek with his thumb, and as the translucent illusion of his skin barely ghosted over hers, goosebumps rose to prickle her flesh like tiny needles, startling her into further sensation. _Rory. I like your bed. I like... everything about you._

_Rory, I want... I..._

"Dean!" she screamed at him, at the figure that was so gently stroking her face, his unnatural touch bundling her nerves like cable wires that were becoming ready to electrocute the love out of them both. "Let me go! Let me..."

"Shhh," he told her, to soothe her panic, and she listened as if his words were real. As if they transcended the barrier placed between them. As if she didn't just believe she was insane, and this was her multi-colored breakdown. "Be with me just once more, one more time," he whispered in her ear. "And then it can be over, you'll see."

"I can't see anything but you!" she said immediately, spewing honesty like uncontrollable vomit in his face. The face that made her teeth chatter with the cold reality that she wouldn't be seeing it again. His death she had known and started to come to grips with; his absence was what was going to be the real challenge, to live on in spite of being truly alone.

He smiled at her sadly, his lips shaking, eyes brimming with tears of solid anguish.

"I've done what I came to do. Now it's our last goodbye."

--

Tidal waves crashed over dead fish bones buried in the ocean. Television screens lost picture, as electricity was stolen from their tightly bundled wires. The world's wars cried until all of their tears rained down on the heated ground to cool it with the agony that they were lost souls, gone, and this moisture was all that was left of them. She heard it... she heard it all.

And then she woke up. She woke this final time, and knew that Dean was gone.

--

"Welcome to this Tuesday edition of the New York Nightly News," said a broadcaster on the screen, and Rory sat with a bowl of sugar puffs and milk, inhaling the food that she could finally taste with vigor again, staring at the most lively creatures in her apartment that she was banished to till tomorrow, for by the time she had awakened, alone and on the floor, she had missed her flight.

Her flight that was a story on the news that night. Her plane to Utah, which had reportedly crashed shortly after take-off, killing everyone aboard, as well as those that were hit from the ground level. Rory's hand shook as it paused with her spoon halfway to her mouth. The plane crashed at 2:26 p.m., it was said. On this Tuesday, a week after Dean's death...

She thought of the bathroom mirror.

She dropped the bowl of cereal, ignorant of the splash of milk that she would rue later, and immediately went to her small suitcase she'd brought back from Stars Hollow, digging through it for the smashed up article that she'd kept as a dear thing, like a stuffed animal that brought comfort despite its unseeing eyes. She searched the printed words with eyes so quick, absorbing every sentence's meaning with the superhero-like speed she'd gained in her time as a practicing journalist. She stopped and sagged back on her heels as she encountered the obituaries' details of Dean's death, a week ago, at 2:26 p.m.

--

Whenever Dean appeared to Rory after that, it was from her knowingly conjuring his image in her mind. There were no more conversations, only the memories stored in her brain, and the pictures that she took out and framed. His physical presence was truly gone, as together they had said goodbye to the blackness when he promised that it was the end. It wasn't long before she trekked back to Stars Hollow, to right a few wrongs, as her old self kept coming back to her in waves until they washed over her comfortingly with every waking moment. (And even in her dreams, which returned to dancing pop-tarts wearing stunning top hats.)

She gave Lorelai genuine hugs, squeezing her so tightly there were broken bone jokes cracked for long minutes afterward, which Rory laughed at, because they were funny. Because she could feel her mother again, feel love for those alive again. Because she could _feel_, period. She felt something so much other than dead, and it was a wonderful thing.

She returned to Dean's grave after giving the gazillion hugs that she needed so badly to share. She thought she might thank him, in a big movie-screen moment, when he couldn't hear her. Thank him for however he was able to hang back long enough after his life was taken to save her own. Thank him for holding her hand and caressing her lips, all of those times when insanity was a likely prospect. She thought she might ask the grey stone why, and wait for an answer from the inscripted name and dates, as if they had his lips still to speak on their behalf.

Her sparkling eyes began to fade in their glory as she came upon his headstone, but there was a small smile that remained, even for him, even as he was gone. For as she looked at his gravesite that had been so clogged with perfumey goodness mere days before, she found that her single white rose, so hastily planted, but so deeply lodged, was the only flower that remained alive, that yet bloomed for him, for his memories, that were of her.

- -  
end


End file.
